


shelter in another skin

by csoru



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Consent Issues, F/F, Recreational Drug Use, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-02 13:31:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6568267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/csoru/pseuds/csoru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t get comfortable yet. I want you to fight me. Give me a workout.”</p><p>“You can’t be serious,” Jessica says, a token protest, even though she knows that Trish is completely serious. “I’ll wipe the floor with you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	shelter in another skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veleda_k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veleda_k/gifts).



> For anyone screening for triggers, the “consent issues” tag refers to an instance where one character ignores the other briefly revoking her consent. No actual noncon happens.

The plaster cracks with an empty, echoing sound like the snap of bone, like a fist connecting with a jaw and the adjacent fracture, dry and bloodless. The sound of it fades to background nothingness, drowned out by the slide of skin on fabric and jeans on cotton and a choked gasp bitten-off in the middle, impact striking air out of lungs, and all of it set to blood coursing and breaths catching and adrenaline screaming, screaming, screaming. Then, the only sound is that of a body hitting the floor; then, for a moment, silence.

Jessica wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, dragging at her split lip hard enough to pull the cut wider. It will heal too soon. She shakes out her wrist to test it for damage, and the movement of her hand scatters a few drops of red on the pristine carpet.

She rolls her shoulders and takes a few steps back from the dented wall, moving into an easy fighting stance.

…

She lets herself into the apartment with a key she found earlier in the week, duct taped to the inside of her left boot by — she hopes — Trish herself. When she unlocks the door and walks in, there is no sudden hiss of nerve gas and no swinging blades come crashing into her skull; Jessica assumes that Trish’s compulsive paranoia either is not progressing as rapidly as anticipated, or she does want Jessica there, even if she cannot be bothered to use her words. It’s better this way. Jessica prefers actions to words, too: they make things clearer, physical and honest, with little room left for manipulation.

Of course, Trish talks and bullshits and talks some more for a living, now. This is Jessica’s life. You couldn’t make it up if you tried.

The apartment is neither dark nor empty, so Jessica doesn’t lurk. She doesn’t sneak around. It still takes her by surprise, taking a step inside, turning to lock the door after herself only to be pounced on. Like a cat, she twists at the lone suggestion of shifting air currents — a sudden pressure, a sudden drop, and she’s had enough of people touching her that she moves out of range by pure instinct without having to reel at contact. It’s pure instinct, too, that she doesn’t fight back and stops the automatic clench of her fist before she can do real damage. Instinct or recognition, something atavistic and learned in the depths of a brain’s unknowable underbelly. She knows Trish by feeling, by scent, by the cadence of her footsteps, and it’s for this reason alone that Jessica doesn’t grab her and smash her skull open with a knee.

Trish dances away before Jessica can get close again. Details register quickly: worn sweatpants, worn t-shirt, her hair in a tight ponytail; bare feet, wide apart in a comfortable defensive stance. Trish is smiling, a wide and unguardedly cheerful expression, but her eyes are full of purpose. She gives Jessica a quick once-over, in the particular way that she has of checking for hurts or injuries without being obvious about it.

“Hey. You got my text.”

Jessica dangles the apartment keys from her fingers. “These, too.”

The grin that pulls at Trish’s mouth is a thing of pure mischief. “Great. We can get pizza later.”

“Oh, I love _later_.” Jessica toes off her shoes and kicks them, with little force, into the hallway closet. They clatter against the far wall without denting it. She shrugs out of her jacket. “Means there’s something shitty that pizza will make up for. What is it?”

She sinks her toes into Trish’s soft, pristine carpet as she walks to the living room, intent to make herself comfortable and only be a mildly irritating guest. Not a guest, maybe: she does, after all, have her own keys now. Before she can throw herself onto the couch in an ungainly sprawl, Trish catches the back of her elbow, keeping her still. It’s Trish, her touch, her hand. Jessica doesn’t flinch.

“Don’t get comfortable yet. I want you to fight me. Give me a workout.”

Details register again, now in context. Workout clothes. Pre-workout adrenaline and cheer. Jessica lets the arch of her eyebrows convey the depths of her skepticism, but Trish only keeps smiling at her, ready and expectant and thrumming with unburnt energy in need of an outlet. Her tempered enthusiasm is oddly puppylike, and Jessica gives up.

“You can’t be serious,” she says, a token protest, even though she knows that Trish is completely serious. “I’ll wipe the floor with you.”

From the back pocket of her loose pants, Trish pulls out a bottle, plastic, orange. Pills. It’s an awful kind of déjà vu, recent memories overlaying old ones and all of them ending in an ambulance: Jessica clutching Trish’s sweaty hand hard enough to leave bruises, never sure which of them might die were she ever to let go. It was years ago and miles away, when she still thought of Trish as Patsy half the time, an unintended cruelty she had yet to unlearn. Trish gives the bottle a small shake and the pills inside rattle. Jessica feels her heart beating in her throat.

“Where did you get these?”

“Some people at a place,” says Trish, infuriatingly.

“You’re insane. I’m not staging an intervention again.”

There, finally: the flinch Jessica knew would come. The flinch she was waiting for, to make sure they are still on the same page, and that Trish is still aware of how it looks for her to keep drugs on her person — aware, even if she chooses to ignore the implications. The hesitation only lasts a moment. Trish clears her expression, too deliberate to be natural, and pulls a plastic pill package from her other pocket. It’s full; she hasn’t taken any.

“Hey, look: an antidote.” For a moment her returning grin looks forced, but then it softens at the edges, and its inviting warmth is enough for Jessica to know that she’s lost before the argument could begin in earnest. “I don’t need an intervention, Jessica. I need a sparring partner. You’re the only one I trust, and this way I’ll keep up.”

She makes it sound easy, but it isn’t inexperience that makes Jessica need convincing. It’s a slow-rolling wave of guilt and nausea, and all she can think of — all she can remember — is the ease with which a human body can be broken beyond repair: one closed fist to the solar plexus, and the crunch of shattering bone that even street noise couldn’t drown out.

She says none of that. She says, “Get someone off Craigslist, or find one of those overpriced assholes who call themselves personal trainers,” and completes the disdain in her voice with sarcastic finger quotes.

“I don’t want a personal trainer, I want you. Come on. Hit me.”

“I’ll hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

For a moment, Jessica is certain that Trish will give her some meaningless platitude, like _You won’t_ , or _I trust you not to_. It would be just like her to want to pretend Jessica is anything but the things she has done and the things she is capable of doing; that Jessica is anything but damage, inflicting and inflicted, object and agent, bone-deep recognition or no.

Yet for all her bad ideas, Trish knows her too well. She runs the backs of her knuckles over the inside of Jessica’s elbow, rubbing once, twice, coaxing and hypnotic. “If you slip, it’ll be on me.” In what seems like cinematic slow motion, horribly inevitable — as if it could have gone any other way, from the very start — she shakes one pill out onto the palm of her hand and swallows it dry. She keeps Jessica pinned with the intent in her gaze as her throat works, and she could be a teenager again, towing Jessica along through sheer force of will, with enough gravitational pull for them both.

Jessica sees the precise moment, the split second of perfect clarity, when Trish’s pupils go wide, and then too wide.

She throws the first punch.

…

The couch is not the first to go, but it goes with a bang. Trish lands badly, kicking out to both sides and looking for purchase on the expensive cushions; she catches one of the armrests with her foot and it ends on the floor, upholstery coming off in a wide vertical stripe like burnt skin, artificial padding bursting out of the tear. Jessica liked the couch. It’s too bad. What she likes more is the noise Trish makes when she rolls off the ruined couch and to the floor, halfway between a moan and halfway between a laugh, and it’s as good as an admission: Trish is enjoying this, and it could be the drugs talking, the lowered inhibitions and heightened reflexes, but it wasn’t the pills that gave her the wild rush of need and it wasn’t the pills that made her embrace it.

Jessica wipes at the sweat on her upper lip.

“So, exactly —” Her voice comes out breathless, catching as if hooked to the inside of her mouth. She has to clear her throat and start again. “Exactly how strong is your attachment to the furniture?”

Trish crawls out from under the coffee table, then gets to her feet, resting her hands on her knees and swaying from one side to the other in a pendulum motion. She’s fine. She’s breathing fast and her eyes are wide, her grin manic, but she’s fine.

“Moderate to slim. I’m thinking the place needs a redesign.”

This, too: it’s a rush. Jessica spends her life navigating people she could snap like twigs, trying to remember even in the midst of every drunken stupor that there is a line normal people don’t like crossed with someone else touching them, the line where bones get broken and muscle gets shredded. The line where they start screaming, and Jessica can only watch, helpless after the fact. No one ever offered to take responsibility for any hurt she might cause, but no one has ever been like Trish. It shouldn’t be news, but it is a kick in the face every time. No one is like her.

Jessica waits to take the first punch this time. She doesn’t block, just moves with it, letting the pain ground her. Trish is good. The krav training shows in the efficiency of her movement and in the sparsity of gesture, an expedience of attack, and Jessica’s unfair — inhuman — advantage is the only reason she doesn’t end up flat on her back with a knee to the throat.

There is blood in her mouth. Trish has a cut over her right eyebrow, oozing slowly, and her t-shirt shows off purpling bruises across her forearms and biceps and it’s not, it’s not bad, and Jessica knows and has always known the she is the opposite of a good person, but it’s not — bad. She swallows, tastes copper.

There is a moment —

…

There is a moment where everything goes wrong, a moment where everything goes right.

There is a moment where their laboured breathing becomes tinged with something deeper, something sticky for want of a lit match, something that Jessica can feel coiling low in her belly. There is a moment where Trish moaning in pain sounds like it might not be just pain, not entirely.

Jessica remembers when Trish bought the coffee table that she falls onto and thinks, skirting mild hysteria, that Ikea should be far too crap to hurt this much. Glass shatters under her weight and momentum. She shouldn’t have taken off her jacket: small shards embed in her pants, in her shirt, dig into her skin to leave a spattering of cuts and bruises she will nurse for a few days. It will be a few days of tank tops and showing off, creeping out the neighbours and passersby. Jessica wears her hurts like ribbons on a uniform.

Her entire back protests when she hits the floor, legs twisting awkwardly against the table’s bare skeleton. She grabs the shitty frame and rips it apart, screws and bolts flying to all sides. She lets her head fall back against the floor, lets her limbs spread where they will, lets herself make a noise that is equal parts pain and satisfaction. In her peripheral vision she registers Trish moving towards her, and expediates no effort to dodge.

Trish jumps her with uncaring abandon, landing hard on Jessica’s thighs with her knees bracketing Jessica’s hips. She uses Jessica’s shoulders for support, leans her whole weight into the push, keeping Jessica in place.

“Seriously? That all you’ve got?” It’s the first thing she has said in a few minutes, and Jessica wishes she could touch the hitch in her voice, to hold it.

“Heavy drinking tends to kill stamina,” she says, shutting her eyes and tipping her head back, comfortable in the wiry cage of Trish’s body, soaking in the warmth that radiates off her arms and thighs and chest. “A little indestructibility doesn’t make me the Terminator, you freak.”

Trish leans a little heavier into her, hot breath close enough for Jessica to feel it on her neck, exhale, exhale, gone on an inhale, and — hold.

Hold.

Hold.

Jessica opens her eyes. All she can focus on, for just a second, are the whites surrounding Trish’s too-wide pupils, the colour draining from her face, her mouth open with no voice or air coming in or out, exhilaration twisting into panic: she can’t breathe. She lets go of Jessica’s shoulders, hands clutching at her own neck and nails digging into skin. It sends her forwards, onto her elbows, onto Jessica.

Jessica doesn’t have a single coherent thought in her skull, except: not again, not again, not fucking again. She flips them over. There is no breath left to get knocked out when Trish falls, and Jessica doesn’t have the time or inclination to be gentle. She moves away only far enough to get to the pockets of Trish’s pants. The cotton tears. Jessica will be apologetic later, or she won’t. Her hands scramble at the plastic packet with the antidote, coaxing a handful of pills out with shaking fingers. Trish’s eyes are falling shut, but her shoulders still come off the floor in sharp bursts of panic as she tries to bully her body into obedience.

Jessica presses hard against the hinge of her jaw until Trish’s lips part, pushes a few tablets on her tongue, closes her mouth and covers it with one hand, fingers over her lips and the heel of her palm holding Trish’s chin up. She waits for Trish to swallow, once, convulsively.

Waits. Jessica’s mind is filled with an overabundance of static: she hears nothing. She waits.

Trish breathes in through her nose like a drowning victim out of the water getting her first lungful of air, the pulse point at her neck beating out a quickstep rhythm of terrified relief. She moans into Jessica’s palm, and Jessica feels no compunctions about lifting Trish’s head slightly just to knock it back into the floor, letting some of her own terror into the gesture.

“You’re an asshole,” she says, pulling away with reluctance. She wasn’t the one to go into respiratory arrest, but she sounds like it, and her hands are not quite steady yet. “Such a goddamned asshole.”

The knee to the ribs catches her off guard, and she grunts in pain. Trish uses her disorientation to hook one leg over the backs of Jessica’s thighs, throw her back down and climb on top. She moves slower, now, with the combat enhancements draining rapidly out of her system, but the purpose is the same, and so is the heat, the rush. They are face to face, close enough again that Jessica can feel the comforting presence of Trish’s breath; close enough that she can see the colour returning to her cheeks, and that her eyes are still a little too wide, though no longer from the drugs.

Trish lets herself lean in, her elbows cushioning the fall. She breathes fully and deeply enough that Jessica feels the rise and fall of her chest where they are pressed close together.

“That’s why you’re here,” she says, speaking to Jessica’s neck or mouth before lifting her gaze back up. “To catch me.”

Time slows, with Trish maintaining careful eye contact. Body heat bleeding into body heat, and Jessica registers every brush of her jeans against the ripped cotton of Trish’s pants, hears the slide of fabric on fabric and skin on skin. The last of her panic falls away and takes the last of her misgivings with it: all that remains is a thrum under her skin, the exhilarated invincibility and the edge of unsatisfied want. It’s so good, with Trish above her and leaning in. It could be so much better, if Trish let it. Jessica lifts her hips, only to be pushed back down. Trish’s lips pull back from her teeth, but it’s far from a smile. It lacks her customary challenge. It’s not sure; she’s not sure.

 _It will be on me_ , Trish said, and there is a moment, inevitable, awful in its simplicity, where Jessica slips.

Time speeds up again, and she moves. It’s no work at all to sit up without fighting against the hold Trish has on her, and with momentum, with her strength, it’s even less work to get to her feet. Maybe it isn’t smooth, maybe it’s not Hollywood unawkward, too forceful and not soft enough to be comfortable or comforting, but she manages. Trish bites off a yelp and keeps holding on, legs tight around Jessica’s waist and arms moving to circle her shoulders. Her ass fits just right into Jessica’s palms, but she doesn’t give in or give up, yet, still ready to fight all the way: bites Jessica’s jaw, tries to grind against her but doesn’t meet enough resistance to build up friction, digs short nails into the meat of Jessica’s shoulders, leaving marks. There is not a superpower on earth that could ever make Trish Walker go down without a fight, and Jessica loves that about her, loves it so much she could level high rise buildings with it.

They hit the wall. The impact makes Trish moan, and even though Jessica was trying to aim for the ruined couch, that noise alone makes up for it. She lifts her a little higher, until she feels Trish’s ankles crossed over her lower back and Trish can look down at her. She’s breathing hard. Her mouth is pulling into a frown at whatever it is she sees in Jessica’s expression, and she says, “No, wait. Hold on —”

Jessica doesn’t let her finish. It’s hard work to get one hand free, the position already making itself known in the faint burn of muscles, but she presses Trish into the wall with her hips and chest, one hand on her thigh, covers her mouth with the other. Keeps looking Trish in the eye, and knows Trish can read the question there with no words necessary. It’s not even a question, not really.

It wasn’t playful from the start, whatever they were doing; it’s something else, now. Trish tries to struggle, kept pinned like a spread and mounted butterfly, but she still doesn’t try to push Jessica away. Maybe it never occurs to her that she might. Maybe she knows Jessica is not one to be pushed unless that is what she wants.

When the anxiety and tension that seem to boil under Trish’s skin are enough that Jessica feels a sympathetic ache in her own joints, she slowly moves the hand she has over Trish’s mouth lower: she moves her hand to wrap around Trish’s throat. She doesn’t apply a lot of pressure, not nearly enough to choke or constrict breathing. It’s barely a suggestion of something stronger, a whisper of force.

Jessica counts in her head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.

The panic recedes from the tense lines of Trish’s body, like cut strings, like a dam breaking. She goes limp in Jessica’s hold in abject surrender, a cold wide-eyed submission that makes Jessica nauseous to see it. She does not let go of Trish’s neck, but presses her face to the slope where it meets the shoulder. It’s wrong, and fucked up, and she can’t believe Trish just let her do this. She can’t believe that Trish stopped fighting, with a hand around her throat, that she is willing to accept the sickening truth: she couldn’t stop Jessica if she tried. But of course, there is no one else. No one like her.

“Shit.” Jessica breathes, unsteady, in and out like rusty engine valves. Each exhale sticks to Trish’s clammy skin. “ _Shit_ , I’m —”

Trish fists her hand in Jessica’s hair and yanks her head back, her thighs around Jessica’s ribs clenched tight. It hurts. It hurts good.

Jessica lets Trish kiss her as if it’s another move in a fight. She has been kissed before like it was the better part of getting punched in the face, but not like this, not quite. Trish bites her lower lip and pulls, another good hurt Jessica would like to carry around like a badge, and as they gain the lost momentum, urgency coming back doubled, she scrambles to shove down Trish’s sweats one-handed — fails, the effort of holding Trish up taking up most of her concentration. She settles for just getting a hand into Trish’s pants, snapping the waistband of her underwear just to have Trish bite down on her tongue, a warning.

When Jessica finally, finally gets her thumb on Trish’s clit and her fingers inside her, Trish digs her nails into the curve of Jessica’s shoulder blade, scratches until Jessica can feel blood welling up. It’s a goddamned effort to hold Trish up against the wall and work her open at the same time, but for every scratch and every bite she clenches around Jessica’s fingers and lets out strangled half-moans, half-wails. It has to hurt. She doesn’t protest. Sweat starts to pool across Jessica’s lower back from the exertion — she has been held up before, she has let others pin her against a wall and fuck her. She never thought it would be this kind of work, not being on the receiving end. She doesn’t want it to ever stop.

With Trish wet enough that three fingers, then four, only make her hips buck harder, it takes so little to get her off that Jessica would be an asshole about it under any other circumstances. She feels the tightening of Trish’s muscles over her fingers, bunch and release, and again, and again, harder each time. She runs her tongue over Trish’s pulse, then bites down, teeth sinking into rigid tendons and sinew. Trish yells. She bangs her head against the wall, her whole body a long line of tension, snapped and released.

When it gets too much, she kicks Jessica in the back with the heel of one foot, and Jessica takes her hand out of her pants, doesn’t care about the wetness she ends up smearing over Trish’s skin. She leans into her, breathing out strain and stress as if Trish’s climax untwisted something inside her, too.

Trish lifts her hands off her back and shoulders. She pushes herself off the wall with enough force that Jessica stumbles and has to start walking back, or drop to the floor. Trish makes no effort to get down, legs still crossed over Jessica’s waist. After a second, Jessica reads the intent in her expression and lets herself fall, taking both of their weights. The floor meets her with a loving punch to the kidneys, with Trish’s weight on top of her.

She sees more than feels, through a daze of subsiding adrenaline, Trish wedging her hands between their bodies and undoing the zipper of Jessica’s jeans, an uncoordinated scramble and flutter. She keeps her head lowered, and keeps her body lower still, pressed so close that she has little room to move her hands. Jessica focusses her gaze, in the absence of anything else concrete enough, on the dent in the wall, the cracked plaster.

Trish brings her off with both hands, on the wrong side of painful or maybe the right, hard and fast as if tearing off a bandaid. She’s so close that Jessica can almost taste the sweat on her face, feel Trish’s breath in her own lungs. Trish closes her teeth over her collarbone, smooths the bite with her mouth and follows it with her tongue. Counting inside her head and clearing it of everything but the corkscrew heat and pleasure, Jessica barely registers closing her eyes. She barely registers twisting her hands into the carpet to keep from inflicting any more damage on a body not her own.

It’s over soon, just like that, without fireworks or sharp surprises: pull a string taut enough, watch it snap, and if you’re not careful it might take out an eye. Jessica curls in on herself, hurting in the only right way as she comes with a bitten-down moan, Trish’s knees across her legs the one thing keeping her from throwing her off. Trish eases her through the comedown, and then the absence of her touch brings Jessica back to full awareness, just in time to see the way Trish is watching her, intent, sucking the wetness off her fingers. Jessica stays sprawled beneath her, watching in return. Sex never lasts long enough, nothing ever sharp enough to give her something more than temporary. It’s always better to give than take, when it is so rarely good enough in the taking.

But Trish kisses her, matter-of-fact and almost, almost easy in her skin once more. It’s good enough. Mediated through her hands and her mouth, the taste is still noticeable, so Jessica bites her. Trish gives her thigh a vicious pinch.

“Asshole,” Jessica tries to say into the kiss that grows lazier by the second, content to let the word dissipate halfway out from between her teeth. She repeats herself when Trish pulls back to let her breathe, and it makes Trish bark out a laugh.

“Maybe if you ask nicely, and that’s a big maybe.”

“Think I’m gonna pass.”

Jessica watches with naked appreciation the way Trish twists up and off of her, limbs loose save for pockets of tension where she will hurt, is already hurting. There is a pronounced limp in her step, but she moves back, looks at Jessica laid out comfortably on her expensive carpet, now blood-spattered and strewn with pieces of broken furniture. Jessica thinks it fitting: she’s another bloody, fucked up fixture. Trish looks away.

“So — pizza? I hope that’s still on the table,” Jessica says, in lieu of _I’m sorry_ or _We’re okay, we’ll be fine_ , pulling herself up to rest on her elbows and no further. It isn’t like she has anywhere better to sit. Redesign, indeed.

Trish looks at her, and smiles: tight-lipped but true. “I’m thinking Thai, actually. Let me get some menus.”

Jessica’s gaze rests again on the dented wall. She can feel, at the backs of her teeth and in the creak of her bones, the way that the plaster cracked and the sound of Trish’s body hitting the wall, and the silence that followed. She wiggles her toes. There is a hole in her left sock, but Jessica isn’t sure if it was there before. She wonders, as she always circles back to wondering, about her own limits. She wonders at the particular way Trish looks at the angular planes of Jessica’s body, the curve of muscle over bone.

She wonders if there is anything that could break her, but with her ribs aching from the press of Trish’s thighs, that is all the answer she needs. Trish would let herself be hurt instead, as a shortcut, a willing mediator between the damage Jessica wants and the damage her own skin will heal from faster than she would like.

She follows Trish into the kitchen, and ignores the pull of abused joints already on the mend.


End file.
